In all respects of the language, each alternative token behaves the same, respectively, as its primary token, except for its spelling.18 The set of alternative tokens is defined in Table 1.
| Alternative | Primary | Alternative | Primary | Alternative | Primary |
| <% | { | and | && | and_eq | &= |
| %> | } | bitor | | | or_eq | |= |
| <: | [ | or | || | xor_eq | ^= |
| :> | ] | xor | ^ | not | ! |
| %: | # | compl | ~ | not_eq | != |
| %:%: | ## | bitand | & |
These include “digraphs” and additional reserved words. The term “digraph” (token consisting of two characters) is not perfectly descriptive, since one of the alternative preprocessing-tokens is %:%: and of course several primary tokens contain two characters. Nonetheless, those alternative tokens that aren't lexical keywords are colloquially known as “digraphs”.
Thus the “stringized” values of [ and <: will be different, maintaining the source spelling, but the tokens can otherwise be freely interchanged.